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As a developer of an app, you are deep into its features. How do you stack up versus alternatives, we offer x, we offer y, we offer z. It can sometimes sound offensive when, as a presentation designer, you come back with a very simple visualisation of a competitive differentiation. This is not a simplistic dumbing down of the story, this the way users / buyers make decisions, and investors understand your story.
I had the opportunity to drive a BMW the other day with al all digital instrument display panel. Car manufacturers have something to learn about design. The display tried really hard to look like an analogue one, reflections, depth effects, glow edges, gradients. The whole thing feels very PowerPoint 2007 / Windows 7 / Nokia to me.
Also, a digital display opens up the possibility to re-arrange how the smaller data elements are displayed (kms, fuel tank, etc. etc.), but BMW did not (yet) do that.
Car instrument panels are up for a big shake up. I think the answer is not displays that mimic analog gear, plus eliminating buttons and replace them with touch screens and menu diving. Instead, I would opt for a beautiful, minimal display of essential information, and actually, very high quality, regular “analogue” buttons.
It affects not only the user/driver experience today, but also whether cars will eventually turn into a classic or not. To make the parallel with electronics, old gear from the 1960s / 1970s can still look/work beautiful, while designs from the 1980s and 1990s with low res/poor digital interfaces look cheap and ugly. Digital displays that look advanced today, will be totally obsolete in 5 years from now.
We will see what happens.
A VC fund who is raising money itself asked me the other day to give some example slides of other VC fund decks I have been working on. Showing slides is not possible because of confidentiality, but I could jot down the usual pieces of content after browsing through a dozen recent ones. Here we go in random order:
Many designers with excellent skills in web and/or print design somehow cannot deploy their talent very well in PowerPoint/business presentations. I have been thinking hard about why this could be.
The key challenge I think is the tight relationship with content and design. In print/web the design of a page does not really change that much if the content changes (it is still a block of text, an image, and an icon that fit in the same overall grid). In a business presentation, everything goes upside down when your competitor analysis needs to include 3 instead of 2 dimensions.
The second reason is - I think - that both people who write presentations and designers who polish them, stick to the conventional slide format: title across the top, list of bullets.
Now here is an interesting experiment for a 100% graphics designer who is not allowed or does not have the knowledge to touch any of the content (the classical print graphics designer situation). Assuming the presentation is a slideument (meant for reading rather than presenting).
Hand over the material in a word processor, as a long text file rather than a partly finished PowerPoint presentation. Now give the designer total freedom to present this material in any form she wants, even in any software she wants, using any page layout she wants.
Changes are you might get a pretty good lucking slideument by taking “PowerPoint” and its familiar layout out of the equation.
Image via WikiPedia
The majority of business pitches do not have the entertainment value of a Harry Potter story. It is hard to transform that customer case example where you installed new servers that are 4x faster into a fast-paced, spell-binding campfire story. And no, few people will be interested in the 30 minute mini episode of a “day in the life of” your hypothetical customer in Amsterdam who had a scalability issue.
So what elements of “story telling” can we use in everyday business presentations? Some ideas.
Business presentations can use elements of story telling without having to open with “let me tell you a story…”
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All my clients want that presentation that uses story telling and captivating images to hook its audience emotionally and gets them to sign an investment check right here, right now.
But sometimes that beautiful story is not the issue. Ideas can be pretty simple to describe, the market size easily understood, what is left is the concern that company can actually make it happen.
Business models, cost structures, go-to-market routes, hiring plans, product releases, all “boring stuff” that pretty much only can be captured in McKinsey-style tables. Ah, that annoying presentation designer who keeps on pointing out inconsistencies between the slides.
These cases also highlight why certain companies can do incredibly well in big audience pitch competitions, but fail to raise money from professional investors scrutinizing the details in small conference rooms.
We are celebrating the Jewish new year here in Tel Aviv, and I just returned form a short bike ride around the city, during which I got an interesting idea that could take SlideMagic into an entirely new direction. Something that was staring me in the face for a few years I think, but I did not spot it. Something that is probably not very hard to do technically, but requires my experience and weird combination of skills to get it right. Sorry to be a bit cryptic here!
There is a 3D cube shape in PowerPoint, here is how you can make it transparent. The secret: rotate a copy of itself and paste them over each other.
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People say that in marketing, it is bad to be negative, trashing the competition’s product and/or business. I can see how that makes sense in public advertising. Being the angry company who keeps on kicking others will not help build your brand in the long term.
In closed room sales and investor pitches, I think it is a bit different. You don’t have much time, and the audience across the table might not know the market very well. Stressing your positives and hoping that they will fill in the comparison to the competition might not be enough.
The tone of a presentation does not have to be negative, the differentiation versus the competition should be made very clear. In most cases, there is a positive way to spin this story. Both models have a reason to exist: your product works great for this segment, the other product will work better in that segment.
Even in the consumer market, people are looking for the head on comparisons, even if they are absent in advertising. Product reviews by trusted sources, and online comments by honest consumers, trolls, and competitors impersonating as a reviewer will inform the buying decisions.
For corporate buyers or investors, this back channel to get the real story does not really exist, and/or they do not have the time to find it, so being a bit more explicit might not be that bad.
Increasingly, presentation meetings are about discussing a proposal for investment or a product sale, rather than confronting an audience with an idea for the very first time. People have gotten the basic idea in material they saw beforehand.
So, there is a new role for busy slides, meant for pondering on a desktop screen.
A number of things can make slides busy:
The first two are a no-go, even for presentations that are meant for reading. The third option however, can be useful. In many cases, it is virtually impossible to visualize a complex timeline or network in a series of slides with pretty pictures and one word on them.
Some guidelines how to design these useful slides crammed with content:
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